Something I DON’T like is people claiming they “knew all along” about Neil Gaiman based just on the subject matter of his work. After the fact, sure, those characters and those scenes are absolutely going to read differently. Now, with context, they tell you things about the author. (thread)
This is exactly the thing that can “cancel” an author for a reader. I can’t read Orson Scott Card anymore, because when I get to the scenes where Ender beats another child to death, I can’t read that anymore without assuming Card actually thinks that’s what justice looks like (based on his politics)
It’s gonna be the same for Gaiman, I’m sure. There are a lot of scenes where consent is dubious, and now I know too much about which parts of which characters probably connect to the author.
BUT. We can’t go around assuming every scene in every story is approved of behaviour by the author.
That’s madness. That’s the death of ALL authors, along with all art. Sometimes you can guess at the inner life of an author, especially one with a wide enough body of work. But literally no one was assuming these things about Gaiman before we all learned too much about his personal life.
And sometimes even when you do make guesses, they can turn out to be wrong! I’ve never read Lolita, but the author wrote that book because HE was assaulted as a child, not because he was a secret pedophile. Knowledge of the author’s life absolutely affects the reading of the work.
It should! It has to! But in the absence of that knowledge, everything is open to interpretation by the reader, and we can’t assume that every evil thing in fiction is a secret wish of the author. Or we’ll have no fiction more complex than a screensaver.
plus the oposite is also true, there have been people out there known for writting wholesome fiction who turned to be pretty awful.
Judging someone solely by their work alone is really a terrible way to gauge their morals
This is really messing with me. The British Invasion was what brought me back into comics, and now half of them have stuff like this - Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman. I feel terrified that now I have to wait for the other shoe to drop with Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.
